The Pirates Hold a Party

A fledgling political movement calling itself The Pirate Party of the United States has emerged from the dust of last month's police raid on The Pirate Bay in Sweden.

Six days after the May 31 seizure of BitTorrent servers, the new organization's website was up and running. Organizers claim the newly launched site drew more than 100,000 hits in just over a week.

The group patterns itself after Piratpartiet, the Swedish political party formerly associated with The Pirate Bay, and says it wants to reform intellectual property and privacy laws. Piratpartiet was launched Jan. 1, and by the end of that first day had gathered the 1,500 signatures it needed to participate in Sweden's upcoming parliamentary elections in September.

Wired News interviewed the founder of The Pirate Party of the United States, Brent Allison, 30, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, and his provisional co-chair David Segal, 20, a computer science major at the University of California Santa Barbara. They shared their thoughts on the stormy seas ahead.

WN: When did the party start, and who started it?

Allison: The party started on June 6, 2006, with two members, myself and my friend Alex English. A couple of days later, I received around 300 e-mails from people I didn't know expressing interest in joining and helping out. This was thanks to publicity from the original Swedish party, Piratpartiet, who found out about it when I edited their Wikipedia entry to include mention of the U.S. version I founded.

On June 9, faced with not being able to finish a dissertation, hold down a job and lead a rapidly growing party at the same time, I handed control of the party to Joshua Cowles and he appointed David Sigal as co-chairman.

WN: What sparked you to form the U.S. version of the Pirate Party, or in David's case, to get involved?

Allison: I have always been concerned that trends in intellectual property policies have been going too far in favor of entertainment conglomerates and major pharmaceutical firms at the expense of ordinary citizens and patients. The passage of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in 1998 first awakened me to this trend. The RIAA's and MPAA's interference in P2P-sharing networks, through lawsuits, political lobbying and flooding them with bogus files, seemed to threaten one of the most democratic institutions in the digital sphere.

A friend of mine on LiveJournal had talked about the Swedish Piratpartiet in a journal entries on June 2. I had heard about the raid on The Pirate Bay earlier, but hearing that not only was a political party's server affected by the raid, but that this party addressed these issues that I cared about made me ask, "Why don't we have a party like that here?" I was frustrated that no third party in the United States, let alone the Democrats or Republicans, was making file sharing, medical patents and overextensions of law enforcement's power top agenda items. So, I thought it was time that a party here actually did that, and if I had to be the one who started it, so be it.

Sigal: It started when Slashdot covered the raid on the Pirate Party. I got into contact with the founders every point they made I found myself agreeing with. Then I took a step back -- we needed something not quite like the Swedish party, but something along those lines.

WN: What do you hope to accomplish?

Allison: Now that I'm no longer in a leadership position, I can't speak for the Pirate Party U.S. as a whole. However, I started the party so it could nominate candidates for public office that would get people thinking about intellectual property and privacy, and confront other candidates head-on about these issues.

Iintellectual property is such an esoteric topic that lawyers, academics and lobbyists have had dominion over it, even though it intimately affects all of us. The public should be informed about and have concrete ideas about IP. Other political parties and public officials should take active stances on intellectual property so voters can associate (the position) with them as they do with taxes and foreign policy.

This party is all about raising awareness of issues that only geeks and lawyers have cared about until now. With enough hard work, we can not only put these issues on the table, but, dare I say it, even win positions in public office for ourselves or other candidates sympathetic to our causes.

Sigal: We're basically trying to take control of the internet. Net neutrality was rejected in the house and there's no one to speak out -- they're trying to make laws about it, when they have no experience in that culture.